Cutting Through the Red Tape

by Miki Litmanovitz, SF2010

A major responsibility of cities is to engage with their residents and keepthem involved, and cities have been turning to socialmedia to help them achieve that goal. The City of San Francisco has alwaysbeen at the forefront of technology and social media. Mayor Gavin Newsom waseven recently named America’s Most Social Mayor for his use of social media.

How can other cities and nonprofits use social media to their advantage?Is Twitter the answer? Or is it Facebook? Blogging? YouTube? Cloud computing? What’s the next trend in bleeding-edgetechnology, and how can NGOs be prepared to use it?

I recently attended a training on how to use social media in the public andnonprofit sectors, and here are some best practices I learned:

by Bethany Rubin Henderson, Founder & Executive Director, City Hall Fellows

Recently I was asked to guest author a blog for the Pepsi Refresh Project.  Here’s my post, republished in full from the Refresh Blog. This was originally posted on March 16, 2010.

Every week, each of the Refresh Ambassadors brings in a new voice to take stock of the ideas populating their category and to gather up a “playlist” of their favorites. Bethany Rubin Henderson, Founder and Executive Director of City Hall Fellows, weighs in. 

Most of the time when people talk about improving their communities, they focus on programs. Fix this road here. Build this community center there. Clean up that park. Start a new youth program. But the critical factor that is often left out of the discussion is human capital. Who is going to do the work of improving our communities? Not just today, but tomorrow and next month and next year and next decade? Three Pepsi Refresh projects are preparing the leaders our communities desperately need.

Next American Vanguard is convening the country’s best and brightest urban advocates age 35 and under to share ideas and connect to experts in their fields.

The New Orleans Citizen Participation Project is developing a systematic, community-driven approach to engaging local residents in the government decisions that affect their lives.

And right outside our nation’s capital, the Neighbor Corps is training diverse, low-income, tenants to become community leaders.

Margaret Mead is right that “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.” Imagine what lots of small groups of thoughtful people, trained by organizations like the ones above, could do!

Bethany Rubin Henderson is the Founder and Executive Director of City Hall Fellows, a non-partisan nonprofit working to solve the talent gap in America’s cities by empowering diverse recent college grads to solve the problems in their own hometowns.

By Shyamali Choudhury, SF2010

As a research analyst in the Controller’s Office, I work in a division called the Office of Economic Analysis (OEA). We look at economic impacts of proposed legislation and frequently field requests for data analysis from various departments. Still, this fall when a request from the City Attorney’s Office came through, it was unusual enough to stir up considerable excitement in our tiny office of three.

The San Francisco City Attorney San Francisco City Attorney successfully moved to intervene on the plaintiff’s side of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a challenge to the voter-passed Proposition 8banning gay marriage in the state of California, which was being heard by District Court Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker. Judge Walker allowed the City of San Francisco to intervene because of his interest in hearing how Proposition 8 would affect city budgeting in terms of higher government costs in health care and social services. To demonstrate this, the City Attorney called upon my supervisor, Ted Egan, as a witness to support a 2008 report from our office on the economic impact of same-sex marriage in San Francisco.

Our office’s involvement energized my interest in the case and provided a reason to visit the courtroom during my supervisor’s testimony.  As we worked to update the report, the potential impact of our research was apparent. The convergence of our office’s research and this important political event was a significant moment for my year in city hall. Though it was an uncommon opportunity in city government, it is characteristic of San Francisco’s leadership on social issues.

By Minh Nguyen, H2010